Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Opening in early 2009, this is an unusual space in that most people cannot make it out: “Is it a café? Is it an event space? Is it a restaurant? Is it a wine bar?” Well, it’s all of the above inside an old, long, barn-like structure across from the diploma factory California Culinary Academy [...]

Thanks to Tim of espressophile fame for giving us a heads-up on this article posted yesterday from GQ magazine: The Most Important Drink of Your Day: Restaurants + Bars: GQ. Tim got his heads-up from the guys down at Verve Coffee Roasters, who are among the handful of regional coffee shops highlighted in this best-of [...]

Last week the Wall Street Journal published yet another recession-themed article that was cited all over the Internet: No More Perks: Coffee Shops Pull the Plug on Laptop Users – WSJ.com. It seemed that every local media outlet followed suit (Coffee Shops Serve Laptop Users a New Blend | NBC Bay Area), with the story [...]

Saturday mornings in the southern part of the city (my neck of the woods) — amidst a maze of freeways, live chickens in a stupor, and competitive, full-contact roller derby among elderly Chinese-American women (just without the roller skates) — is Alemany Farmers’ Market time. This ain’t no yuppie Ferry Building farmers’ market; this is [...]

Most locals mistakenly presume this is a new (opening in 2009) corner café simply called “The Creamery” — based on its building signage and its product offerings. However, it is a retail operation of the Gilt Edge Creamery, a family-owned SF institution for milk, butter, eggs, and cheese since 1908. (The family that owns it, [...]

We had originally posted this as an addendum to our recent review of the new, more permanent installment of the Blue Bottle Coffee Co. in the Ferry Building Marketplace. However, the strange phenomenon of the Gibraltar deserves its very own post. Originating here in San Francisco, the Gibraltar has since spread to Los Angeles (Intelligentsia [...]

Opening up in the latter half of 2008, this café may serve salads, soups, wine, and even light dinner plates, but don’t let that fool you: this is a serious coffee destination. Which is not surprising, given that Andy Newbom of Barefoot Coffee Roasters personally tipped us off to check this place out. Just a [...]

Just a few years ago, for a variety of reasons, we were avid and regular home coffee roasters. Today we still occasionally roast our own coffee at home, but we find far fewer reasons to do so — and we find ourselves doing it much less often. The reasons for this change are partly personal. [...]

It is Labor Day weekend in San Francisco. And the only thing keeping us from inaugurating Itching Man, our long-proposed rival event to Burning Man, was Slow Food Nation ’08. For a little background, we mentioned this event in a post last week. Given how it had been billed, we had hopes there would be [...]

With little fanfare, last week Four Barrel Coffee finally graduated out of the ranks of the Malaysian street food experience and opened up its formal café space. So this week we paid a visit to check out the new digs — and update our espresso review. (See: our previous Four Barrel Coffee Trip Report.) Last [...]